Friday, Jul 4, 2008
Two new media studies amplify the death cries of the literate overclass.
Jan 27, 1999 | On Jan. 12 Neal Gabler spoke in New York City about his book "Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality." The place Gabler elected to give his talk, as if to mock his earnestly dramatic subtitle, was the mid-Manhattan branch of the Gannett-funded historamusement complex the Newseum ("Where fun is a matter of fact!"). The packed auditorium broke down more or less as you would expect: a right-minded, public-affairsy mix of tweedy Moynihan Democrats, self-improvement-minded retirees, serious-faced publishing ephebes in Banana Republic and so on.
But there was something else about this bunch. A goodly minority were -- how can I put this delicately? Ah, I know. A goodly minority were nuts. A dainty elderly lady with a Citarella bag snapped loudly at a man who brushed against her halfway through the talk. A neatly dressed young lady crossly demanded she get to ask the final question. An academic-looking bearded gentleman in the back row groused to himself about the media so loudly that he was asked to leave, then got into a shoving match with the meek usher who removed him.
One would not normally expect Jenny Jones-style throwing down from this Lake Wobegon, Metropolitan Diary crowd. But here's the secret about the right-minded, public-affairsy intelligentsia these days: It is remarkably pissed off. Can the media be brought to trial? the audience asked. Why do they release such ridiculous movies? How do we make them stop?
There was a hint in this little scene of the sort of violent 19th century cultural ferment that Gabler describes in the beginning of his book: a period when New York theater presentations incited riot and bloodletting on Astor Place. Except that today, in their small, polite way, the elites are rising against the masses -- at least against the mass media, spurred by Lewinskiana and the Jerries Springer and Bruckheimer. This is a period, after all, when the New Yorker's Talk of the Town section has hit a two or three anti-Starr piece a week clip; when Nora Ephron has made a hit romantic comedy about affluent Upper West Siders' anxiety over the Internet and independent booksellers; and when a succession of authors have hit the hustings with their diagnoses of media illness. The rank and file of America may well detest the media -- we keep telling them they do -- but the hardly downtrodden, right-minded liberal-arts set feel something slipping away from them too. Something like the control of the world.
The man at the Newseum was telling them that that control has been ceded to Hollywood -- the state of mind if not the actual industry. In "Life the Movie," Gabler, author of "An Empire of Their Own" and "Winchell," argues that the mass media not only have turned all they present -- politics, war, murder -- into entertainment but have caused us to lead our lives as calculated performances as well. It's an attractive argument, in the light of the claustrophobic, world-as-Skinner-box theories of mass media manipulation promulgated by everyone from the creators of "The Truman Show" to Mark Crispin Miller and Bill McKibben back around to Bill Bennett; and it seems to have largely inspired, or at least benefited from the timing of, the recent Newsweek cover story on "stars of the new news" like Don Imus (and Salon's David Talbot) "turning politics into entertainment," in which Jonathan Alter gave Gabler a generous shout-out.
Gabler contends that modern news events, public discourse and even our private lives are now self-consciously modeled on the movies, becoming presentations he calls "lifies." Beginning in the Jacksonian era, Gabler traces how elitist art and populist entertainment have clashed in American culture, with the latter ultimately dominating. So what's the difference between art and entertainment? Gabler hedges on this question, a substantial flaw in a work wholly concerned with entertainment, but he allows as how "the elitists" (perhaps he's wary of being called one himself) hold that "art treated each viewer, listener or reader as an individual" while entertainment "dealt with its audience as a mass" and expected to elicit the same response from everyone. (This definition runs into trouble later, when Gabler discusses artists like Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman and David Bowie as being in "a new monoculture where entertainment and art blended," though his earlier definition would seem to make them mutually exclusive.) As Americans gained leisure time and disposable income, the demand for entertainment meant that any media outlet wanting the public's dollar -- and thus anyone wanting the media's attention -- had to provide a show, leading serially to the penny press, the tabloid, the confrontational talk show, the academic media star, the degradation of high-brow magazines and numerous other mile markers on the road to hell.
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